House in city park, Ovar | Nelson Resende Arquitecto

The construction of a small house on a very small plot of 80.00m2, located next to the city park in Ovar, made it possible to solve a 2-bedroom typology, with very controlled areas and developed in a type of construction that was intended to be flexible and adaptable, in a certain adaptation of the request to the area of the existing land.

The privileged location, given that this house is on the front line of the city's urban park, ends up placing it in a prominent position, so its materialization tended to take on the responsibility of making the city stand out, ensuring the creation of an improved urban image, a kind of object house, assumed to be worked on like an inhabited sculpture.

However, we are talking about a micro-construction, with an implantation area of 40.00m2, allowing the dwelling to be developed on two floors plus an access to the 3rd floor, an outdoor space par excellence.

The stratification of the program - social use on the ground floor, private use on the 1st floor, terrace on the 2nd floor - is accompanied by a differentiation of the polygons of each of the floors, the materials that make them up, externally and internally, as well as the environments that were sought.

The garden on the patio, which expands on the park and makes the adjacent interior spaces more enjoyable, the small balcony that supports the bedrooms and finally the terrace, in the volumetry that seeks to merge with the landscape.

The aesthetic result of the articulation of the various materials is also the result of the search for a certain bucolic register, of accommodation with the increasing visual presence of the park and its trees that grow year after year, densifying the canopies and the shadows they produce, making the paths more pleasant, creating habitat for the various birds that chirp, for the breeze that through the trees creates lulling melodies and that, in this way, allows us to look at the house as a kind of retreat, where not only the built object itself but we ourselves can afford a certain abandonment of mundanity, a kind of conscious disinterest in urbanity, frenzy and everyday life - and the house itself reveals this apparent empathy with a more relaxed, unpretentious and quietly accommodating posture in its apparent vulgarity, which is nothing more than acceptance of its surroundings.

Trying to age in an honest and integrated way with the garden that surrounds it, creating patinas in the different shades of exposed concrete that make up each of its floors.